holy shit i handed in the (almost) full draft of my dissertation to my advisor yesterday. 100 pages, not including references (or, as yet, a conclusions chapter, but who's counting?)

when i handed it to him, he said "this is a draft of the whole thing?" me: "except the last chapter, which i'll get to you asap." him: "you know, it will probably need significant revisions." me (to myself): gee, thanks for the vote of confidence, though you're probably right, because i'm pretty sure lots of this is half-assed. me (aloud, cheerfully): yep, i know. especially the intro chapter, since i just finished it yesterday and no one's read it but me.

then, i broke the news to him about my foreign service clearances coming through, to which he appropriately responded "congratulations!" i told him what my expectations were wrt the FS, namely that i expect to have a job offer in my hot little hands as early as next week, but almost certainly by the end of the month. to start march 6. he looked shocked, and asked me how i knew it would be march 6 (because the FS has 5 orientation classes per year, and the next one starts march 6). looked shocked some more.

so he promised to read it "right away" (which for him could mean anytime in the next 6 months--i'll have to stay on him.)

i'm really nervous. i've worked really really hard on this draft, though admittedly my background research is probably not as thorough or as insightful as one might ideally hope. so i expect him to come back at me with a "this needs some serious revision--total restructuring. here, start by reading these 73 articles." at which point i fear i may well just crumble into a heap of failure and dispair and give up.

on the one hand, i have a hard time believing that something like that could happen. my advisor has said to me that he thinks i deserve to get my ph.d., and he knows i (almost) have a job offer, and am (definitely) leaving academia, so it's really no skin off his back if i submit a crappy-semicrappy dissertation--it's not like it's going to reflect badly on him as an academic if his government-employee student doesn't do fabulous work.

but on the other hand, he's done stuff like this to me before. like when he refused to let me use my NIH grant application research proposal as the intro to one of my chapters because he had helped me write it, even though student dissertations are frequently partly written by advisors because they are essentially 2 or 3 journal articles stapled together and the advisor had helped write the journal article. so i had to rewrite, from scratch, the entire section, with no help from him other than "here, this is a list of [a big number] articles that i found on a search, they might be helpful." nevermind that some of them were IN FRENCH.

to sum up: even though i've submitted a draft of (nearly) my entire diss, it doesn't seem possible that i'll actually graduate.